Saturday, September 02, 2006

My Poll Methodology

Well, those cheapskates Clint Reed and Sen. Gilbert Baker have not taken me up on my generous offer to devise a poll methodology that would show the Republicans winning big time for only $5,000. Considering how much milage the Little Rock media is getting out of these polls showing their side is down, that would be a bargin. Some people make it really hard for you to help them!

Anyway, since those guys are gonna take a pass, the only way I can hope to make any money off this is to write a good blog article that draws some viewers. That might raise my google ad revenues by hundreds, or even thousands of millipennies, so here goes....

First of all, the state needs to be divided into two parts, with half of the sample drawn from each. The parts will be "Northwest Arkansas" and "rest of state".

Secondly, the "rest of state" will be divided evenly between the Congressional districts for all urban and suburban voters. For the first district, phone calls will be split evenly between Mountain Home and Jonesboro. For the Second District, half the calls will be split between Maumelle, Conway, and Sherwood. Since it would not be fair to leave out Little Rock in the 2nd district slice of the poll we will also poll all zip codes in Little Rock, so long as they are west of 430.

The fourth district is really dicey, but I think we can get a good measure of the district by spreading phone calls among Hot Springs, El Dorado, Magnolia, and Texarkana.

Like most conservatives, I am not sensitive to racial issues. I ignorantly just treat everybody the same no matter what color they are. Still, the liberals will complain if we don't take race into account, so we want the poll to accurately reflect all ethnic groups. That means black voters will make up 12% of respondents. Candidates to such voters will be identified as "the candidate for the same party that Abraham Lincoln was in" and "the guy from the party that had that pro-slavery plank for so long."

Though it may surprise some, Hispanic voters seem to be the most Republican-leaning group in the other polls. We will sample them at twice the rate they show up in the census on the basis that there are more of them that are uncounted. We will have to screen them out by legal and illegal though: "If you are a legal citizen of the United States, press one, if you are not, please hold until Jim Holt leads a team from Immigration Control and Enforcement to your your location."

Of course, rural voters need to be included in our poll too, because this is a rural state. What we can do here is just call everybody in the Paron area white pages. If we need a few more, there are plenty of places around the state that can meet my polls definition of rural- a place so isolated that the Democrats decided that their school was too small to exist.

One more thing, it is really unfair how the major media polls have left off half the candidates for Governor on their polls. Our poll will include Green Jim Lendall and Independent Rod Bryan. Of course, that means there will be three liberal candidates on the ballot and only one non-liberal. Because of this and because our Secretary of State is so against "ballot clutter" we will alternate liberal names in our poll. Each person that is asked will be given a choice between Hutchinson and two of the following three: Beebe, Lendall, Bryan. Hey, its a more fair way to do it than to conduct a poll that NEVER MENTIONS two of the three liberals!

Well, that is my short list. If anybody else has any ideas for poll methodology, please feel free to post them here. Just don't expect those tight-wads at GOP HQ sitting on their bags of cash from the Bush fundraiser to pay you for them!

Since you mentioned our Secretary of State and "ballot clutter," do you think there's a possibility that Daniels would have appealed the court's decision on the Green Party only Jim Lagrone made an issue of the military votes being late because of the Green Party in the last election and Daniels doesn't dare hold up the military vote again?

I think that is it exactly. Daniels would have loved to appeal that ruling, his blather about deciding not to appeal because "he wanted to see more people voting" was DOA. The real reason is that Jim LaGrone would have torn him up for it.

You're right. And I, for one, would have loved to have seen that and see Charlie try to lie his way out of it, like he did in the article that was in the paper this past Friday with Charlie's CYA military press conference he held Thursday.